Search This Blog

Nigritella nigra - Black Vanilla Music

A composition for clarinet and string quartet

Nigritella nigra's first part (until 3'50'') consists in a chord which color changes through the use of microtones. This is a musical image of the flower's vanilla scent. The short central passage (until 4'15'') is a deforming mirror. After that comes a distorted retrograde of the first part. The concentration of energy in microtones in the first part is transformed in more extravert gestures in the second part. The flower Nigritella nigra has a strong character!

The Centre Acanthes took place in the beautiful Chartreuse de Villeuneuve-lez-Avignon, and July was very sunny. The concert happened in a medieval church, open on the outside. As you can hear on the recording, the cicadas were enjoying the hot wheather!

My first "classical" composition

As you can see on my 1998 manuscript, I used a very unconventional notation for microtones. Actually, at the time, I didn't even know the word microtone! So, I wrote a minus sign to mean "about 1/6 tone lower than the pitch", and a double minus to mean "about 1/3 tone lower."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In April 2008, I was invited by composers Eric Chasalow and Maxwell Dulaney to give a 2-day seminar on spectral sound processing techniques at Brandeis University Music Department.A topic the music students particularly enjoyed was the frozen sound, the audio equivalent of the cinematic "freeze frame shot". I taught the nuts and bold of the real-time stochastic spectral freeze technique (the stochastic component is aimed at breaking the ice - with the audience).On this video, discover 5 variations on a Max/MSP/Jitter freeze tool:DownloadsNote: the Max patches available here have been completely revamped since this article & video were initially published.New Spectral Freeze Max MSP Jitter patches(link updated Nov. 2019)A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP and Jitter: Computer Music Journal, Fall 2008SyllabusThe program for just two 3-hour workshops was quite ambitious!April 14thOverview of the topic: “Spectral processing, or having fun with graphics and s…

When I discovered electronic music during the Centre Acanthes 2000/Ircam, my favorite topic was real time sound processing in frequency domain. Hans Tutschku taught the wonders of AudioSculpt in Avignon, before Benjamin Thigpen taught Max/MSP in Helsinki.Now, the Computer Music Journal just published an article I wrote about spectral sound processing in real time and performance time (whereas real-time treatments are applied on a live
sound stream, performance-time treatments are transformations of sound files that are generated during a performance). If you are interested in graphical sound synthesis, phase vocoder, and sonograms (or spectrograms), I hope you will enjoy this tutorial.The great news is that you can download the article for free on the page of the Computer Music Journal, Issue 32, Volume 3.Max/MSP/Jitter patchesYou can readily apply the described techniques in the development environment Max/MSP/Jitter. For a hands-on approach, make sure you download the patches on my…